5/30/2003 @ 12:01AM

The World's Most Expensive Photograph

At Christie’s in London on May 20, the oldest extant image of the remains of the Athenian Temple of Olympian Zeus, or “Olympieion,” on the Acropolis, 1842–among the most “modern” compositions by the seasoned 19th-century French traveler, artist and historian of Islamic architecture, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (1804-1892)–became the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction.

The photograph was one of 86 lots, the first public offer of its kind since Christie’s private treaty sale to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France of “Important Daguerreotypes from the Archive of the Artist” in 2000. This unique, large full-plate image, labeled verso in his hand: “113. Athènes. 1842. T.[emple] de J.[upiter] Olympien. pris de l’Est,” more than quadrupled its estimate of £90,000 to £120,000, rocketing the benchmark for both a daguerreotype and record for a photograph at auction to a monumental £565,250, or $922,488 (€789,654). Amid intense international interest, it was bought by an anonymous overseas collector, widely believed to be the wealthy Sheikh Saud al-Thani of Qatar, along with a good number of other top lots from the sale, which doubled, tripled, quadrupled and quintupled estimates or, even, exceeded them by a factor of ten. If so it will be the latest addition to the rich holdings of 19th-century British and French photographs destined for his new museum.

The following day’s sale of photographs at Christie’s, King Street headquarters, continued on a roll, setting three new auction records for works by Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966), whose “Vortograph” gelatin silver print of 1917 went for £139,650, or $229,165 (€195,230), nearly twice its high estimate of £80,000; Louis Rousselet (1845-1929), whose two albums with 155 out of 160 albumen prints, “Voyage dans l’Inde,” 1865-68, made £71,700, or $117,659 (€100,236), with an estimate of £60,000 to £80,000; and for Benjamin Brecknell Turner (1815-1894), whose mid-1850s “Walter Chamberlain hiding behind Bredicot pump,” salt print from paper negative, realized £38,240, or $62,751 (€53,459), above its estimate of £10,000 to £15,000, also set a world auction record for the artist.